Deciding to use social media

Hi. My name is Julie Atherton. I'm the founder of Small Wonder, a social media advisory and marketing consultancy, and I write books on social media and social media strategy. Today, we're going to talk about how to decide whether to use social media or not.

Brands need to decide whether they're going to use social media to promote a product, service, or campaign.

There'll be lots of ways that they choose to do that and some big brands decided not to use social media at all or to limit their social media activity. For example, Wetherspoon, the UK pub brand, left social media in 2018. The chief executive of the organisation didn't believe that social media is adding to the bottom line. They conducted a survey of all of their pub staff and also looked at it at the board level, and decided that the amount of time that was being spent on individual pub managers maintaining social media accounts wasn't transferring into footfall and spend within their pubs. They therefore left social media, and do not operate on social media channels to this day. They are, however, present on social media because people who visit Wetherspoon, their suppliers and their customers do talk about them on social media channels. In addition, they have a large presence on the high street and a very vocal CEO. So they're very much in the news. Another brand which has spent some time dabbling in and out of social media is Tesla. Initially, they didn't operate on Facebook because Elon Musk, the owner, didn't really believe that Facebook was the right place for them to be. He felt uncertain about their data privacy laws, particularly after the Cambridge Analytica scandal. However, Tesla does operate on Instagram and Elon Musk owns X, and they have a very active profile there. The third brand that I want to mention is Lush, which is the vegan cosmetics brand. They have very strong ethical principles around body image, animal cruelty and also human rights and activism. They were very active on social media channels, when in 2021, they decided to leave the main social channels such as Facebook and Instagram because of the way body image was being portrayed, and they felt it didn't fit with their values. However, Lush wanted to maintain engagement with its active community and therefore moved to Discord. Without the imagery, it could have active engagement and keep interest in its products and campaigns without compromising its values. Interestingly, although these are all very, very different brands, they do have one thing in common. Someone in leadership within the organisation looked at the values and principles that they had and considered their own opinions, sometimes not backed up by facts but just principles, and made a decision to leave. All these brands have continued to be very successful despite making the choices that they have about social media. But as I mentioned for Wetherspoon, just because they're not active on social media with their own profiles doesn't mean that people aren't talking about them on social media, and that they aren't using other channels to promote their brands and share their opinions.